Books: Confucius to Pound

THE CLASSIC ANTHOLOGY DEFINED BY CONFUCIUS (224 pp.)—Translated by Ezra Pound—Harvard University ($5).

Some five centuries before Christ, the Chinese put together a kind of 3O5-poem treasury of their own verse. Around 484 B.C., Confucius, an inveterate lute player, edited the musical scores for the poems, and told his son: “A man who hasn’t worked on the [Odes] is like one who stands with his face to a wall.” In this volume. Poet Ezra Pound makes a free and brilliant translation, even to the use of jazz idioms and hillbilly dialect.

The poems are by turns idyllic, ironic and bitter. “Planners” Raw Deal and Decade of T’ang, which tell of a people’s agelong suffering under tyranny, are particularly gripping against the background of present-day China. Although Pound, now 68, was charged with wartime sedition in 1945 and confined to Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital as “mentally incompetent.” he proves once again that he is one of the finest U.S. poets alive.